Diana Frey and Fraud: The Face of the Public Sector Union

Of course it is a terrible tragedy the entire situation emerging around Diana Frey President of CODE (Cincinnati Organized and Dedicated Employees).  She is being indicted for a wire tapping charge and embezzlement of more than $750,000 from her union members.  You can hear all about the case by Doc Thompson, Scott Sloan and Tracy Jones on 700 WLW.  For people not familiar with Frey, you might remember her famous quotes during the December 2010 budget talks; “I’d rather be a laid-off municipal employee than a private sector worker.”  That comment earned the attention of several council members who later revealed, “The city unions are determined to protect its members regardless of the impact on the city’s budget.”

As I watched Sheriff Jones of Butler County speak at the recent West Chester Twp Tea Party when he told me that all union employees are not “thugs,” that many of them are good hard-working people, I was thinking of the Frey case that was breaking at the time.  The Sheriff is a spokesman for the repeal effort of S.B.5.  Jones is the spokesman for the repeal effort for a couple of reasons.  He’s outspoken, and has done a good job managing his county compared to other sheriff’s counties.   He’s one of the best in the country and by coming out against S.B.5 he gets to put a light on just how good he is at his job.  He’s also been a public sector employee his entire life.  The world of milking the system for everything its worth is part of the job culture he has grown to understand as being the only way.  So he’s hardly an impartial observer.  Without question if he was asked about his thoughts of Frey, he’d say, “That wouldn’t happen in my department,” because it wouldn’t.  But when he speaks out against S.B.5 and Governor Kasich specifically, he is sabotaging the attempts by the Kasich administration to actually do something about the corruption that is going on in the public sector unions. 

I can’t speak for Kasich, but he behaved the way I would have in his situation.  He has no desire to sit down with people like Frey and negotiate.  When union leaders make comments like what Frey did in December, there isn’t any discussion with people like that, so Kasich cut them out of the process and did what he thought he had to do. 

With Jones, I listened to him carefully and as he spoke about how he viewed the public collective bargaining system as a good system that should be preserved, my mind drifted back to the Journal News article from April 11^th 2011 that was about Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer, a double-dipper working directly for Jones.  Dwyer was listed as taking a 15% pay cut to keep his job which put his current rate of pay at $90,050.48.  Dwyer had just retired at 48 years old and was receiving his pension based on his previous rate of pay of $105,941.48, so that’s a very good pension to draw along with his salary of just over 90K.  This is the same game that superintendents are playing with school districts, and this whole scam was negotiated under collective-bargaining, so of course Sheriff Jones thinks the system works.  It works for him, his family and friends who are working under him.  These are people who are making great livings off the tax payer. 

When asked about the merit of double-dipping Dwyer said “many people don’t understand the retire-rehire process.  It’s not uncommon for people to reach retirement age and take other jobs.  That was an option that was open to me and I was looking at that option, quite frankly.”

Sheriff Jones said, “He’s got his time in and was looking to draw his retirement and put his time in elsewhere.  I need him right where he is.  He’s a very valuable employee to me.”  So Sheriff Jones is perfectly fine with this whole double-dipping situation.  He’s fully aware of it and actually views Dwyer’s situation as “putting his time in.”  And like I said, Jones is one of the most responsible public employee managers in the country.

Jeff Gebhart who is the president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 101 said of the Dwyer situation, “It’s what the system allows.” 

All these high-ranking officials have the same dear-in-the-headlights look when they are questioned about how public officials are receiving extraordinary benefits from the taxpayer.  And that system Gebhart is talking about is the lobby power of the unions who have created through legislation the ability of management officials to retire at such a young age and double-dip as a specific strategy to pay-off those managers legally.  This is why superintendents of schools do not combat the teachers unions, but instead side with them in negotiations.  Because it’s all about the money, it’s about the money with teachers, and it’s about the money with cops, even the very good ones like Sheriff Jones. 

So if Jones is the best example of the public worker and Diana Frey is the worst of what public sector unions bring to the table, what does that say about the need for reforms?  It’s no wonder with all the scamming the system that is going on by these people why the need for tax increases is constantly brought to our attention. 

President Obama, who allows big labor into the White House each week won’t take a stand against this corruption in his budget battles because he needs the money extorted from union membership for his re-election campaign.  Obama and his wife have lived an extraordinarily opulent life on the tax payer dime.  Click here to see just one example of Michelle Obama’s spending habits.  But locally, the good Sheriff Jones is covering his 48-year-old second-in-command who is making nearly 200K per year with benefits with rationalizations of employee need.  Geez, no wonder it costs nearly 50K per year per prisoner in Ohio.  The labor for watching those prisoners is extraordinarily high!  But now we have the president of a union who was very vocal in the budget talks with Cincinnati who was stealing money from fish fry’s, and sucking money off her members for her personal use.  No wonder people like her want to see S.B.5 overturned.

Diana Frey appears to have been a bad person if the allegations leveled against her are true.  As of this writing she is missing and hiding out someplace with three-quarters of a million dollars stolen from her unions membership, many of which are the same simple-minded people who are screaming at anti-S.B.5 rallies “This is what democracy looks like,” and the most famous quote of all, “protect the middle-class.”  It is obvious that without a bill like S.B.5 continued abuse of the taxpayer will continue.  Because in reality what we are talking about here is a society of thieves, who are taking what does not belong to them to consume for their own selfish agenda’s.  It doesn’t matter if it’s legalized theft, like what Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer is participating in, just like most of the superintendents of most of the school districts in Ohio.  Or they are just outright stealing, like it appears Diana Frey has been doing for a long time in front of everyone to see, but nobody had the guts to question her.  It all comes back to the ultimate mistake of the Kennedy Presidency in 1963 where through an Executive Order, made public sector unions legal, enabling the people of those unions to give themselves raises and cheat the system for everything that the law would allow, and where the law didn’t allow, those same unions made it legal through hungry, greedy politicians looking for stable campaign donations.  It is the system itself that is the real thief, for it takes too much money from the public it serves and feeds an army of thieves who nourish themselves with the vast wealth consumed by the malcontents.  And when the money runs low, they just ask for more so deputies can collect two incomes for the work of one, and corrupt union bosses who give themselves lavish vacations on their theft and will steal from a fish fry to buy clothing yet continue to roam free.  That may be what democracy looks like, but it’s not what the Republic of America is supposed to be.  Anything that resembles something besides a republic should be scrapped completely because anything less is a tempting playground for looters and thieves.

Rich Hoffman

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